Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2025, pp. 84-85
Waging Peace
ROBERT BUZZANCO, professor emeritus at the University of Houston, author of Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era and co-host of the “Green and Red” podcast, spoke at the Palestine Center’s lunchtime lecture series on June 13. His talk was titled “Vietnam Then, Palestine Now: U.S. Subversion of Liberation Movements.”
Land ownership served as a driver of resistance in Vietnam, and continues to do so today in Palestine, according to Buzzanco. In pre-war Vietnam, “less than two percent of Vietnamese owned land,” and most arable land was owned by elites tied to the French colonial power. Land reform became a central demand of revolutionaries, with key slogans like “land to the tiller” emerging from the Viet Minh nationalist movement. In the 1950s, when the Viet Minh briefly controlled a unified Vietnam, they implemented land reform policies that were later repealed with U.S. support. “Land which had been given to peasants and others was returned to many of these older landholders,” Buzzanco said. The radicalizing effects of dispossession can also be seen in Palestine, where land seizures have been a catalyst for rebellion, dating back to the 1936 Arab Revolt. Nearly a century later, Hamas cited the illegal expulsion of Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah as a reason for its 2021 war with Israel.
In both countries, indigenous populations were labeled as “invaders” to justify their displacement. In Vietnam, the U.S. and allied media perpetuated the idea that North Vietnam had invaded the South, but Buzzanco explains, “there really weren’t two Vietnams. One was just artificially invented” by the U.S. Washington labeled the indigenous resistance as foreign aggression, a strategy that Buzzanco argues has been used against Palestinians. This framing attempts to legitimize the occupiers’ claim that they must protect themselves from the threat of native populations. In Palestine, it is used to justify displacement and settlement expansion, while in Vietnam, it legitimized the forced transfer of South Vietnamese villagers to “strategic hamlets,” which “were referred to at the time as concentration camps,” Buzzanco noted.
Buzzanco likened Israel’s expansion of its war on Gaza into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran to Washington’s expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos. He noted that the U.S., while already deeply engaged in Vietnam, dropped millions of tons of explosives on both nations, the effects of which are still present today. Pointing out that “there are still 80 million unexploded little bombs” in Laos, Buzzanco said that “the level of environmental destruction still really hasn’t been reckoned with.” Since October 2023, Israel is estimated to have dropped over 100,000 tons of ordinance on Gaza. “Who knows what Gaza will look like going forward...but it’s really a terrifying thought,” Buzzanco said.
The media narratives regarding Vietnam and Palestine mirror each other closely. According to Buzzanco, the Vietnam War was widely framed by establishment journalists as a moral war. He cites Ken Burns’ 2017 docuseries on the Vietnam War as perpetuating the common trope “that the Vietnam War was more or less a noble cause…the U.S. went in there with the best of intentions and they made a mistake.” Buzzanco noted that the legacy media repeats Israeli talking points about having “the most moral army in the world, or the only democracy in the region.” Similarly, anti-colonial groups have been stripped of nuance in order to villainize them. “In Vietnam, the rationale for…opposing anti-war people was that they were communists, or they were communist dupes. Today, calling somebody Hamas fills the same role,” said Buzzanco. “In 1969, Ho Chi Minh was the new Hitler…today it’s Hamas.”
Dehumanization is crucial to manufacturing consent for scorched earth military aggression in both countries. In Vietnam, “the United States established free fire zones, search and destroy missions…they deforested entire areas with herbicides, napalm, Agent Orange, white phosphorus…if you were to put together a list of the kinds of things the United States did, it would match with great synchronicity to what’s happening today with Israel.”
The pattern of villainization followed by destruction reveals the continuity between Vietnam and Palestine. “It’s an old playbook,” said Buzzanco, “they’ve learned well from it…the lengths to which it [the United States] will go to defeat these movements, often very violent means, is worth knowing.”
—Silas Gaughran-Bedell
